As I get older, I just don't care about new technology

Honestly, this is how I've been feeling lately. Everything is old now.

It's been a long time since a huge revolution tech wise happened. It's just incremental evolution now, and a lot of it is NOT for the better.

The Playstation 2 was as far away from the Atari 2600 as we are from the Playstation 2 today. One of these periods had a lot more change.

Have we finally?

That reemergence of DLL hell on the web that every bright dev insisted was The Modern Way to code (or quit to somewhere else that enabled it) accompanied by spending my days pointlessly upgrading a mix of abandoned and pointlessly breaking packages then submitting forks/patches so they could remain in sync with each other was about the point that I gave up coding because I felt I’d stopped making an impact and moved to management.

We seemed to suddenly move from fast REPLs where we could iterate with the customer and solve problems while knowing most of the stack enough to code, deploy, and support, back to the pre-my-days compiling sword fights of old together with days to get undocumented boilerplate up and running with fancy pipelines that no one understood yet alone dared touch. I was never entirely sure what we gained but it certainly seemed to make coding both less fun and less productive yet everyone defended the new normal.

Then sitting as a manager after that dev career watching relatively basic form journeys takes teams of five 9 months to implement on the latest stacks when that used to be something a single junior dev knocked out in a week or two and the teams be shocked when in a crisis you could reason out the stack with them in a way that doesn’t seem to really be taught anymore (academically or professionally).

I’m not even 35 and I’m still a tad shy of 20 years professional experience but I already feel like a greybeard full of unbelievable “back in my day” stories when I look at the systems I considered and built resiliently a decade ago still ticking along, and still get easily upgraded as the environment and systems around them change. Meanwhile I watch new projects that would have been a small piece of work, maybe even just a ticket for a couple people, now take cross-functional teams of 50 up to 18 months to move through the org machine only to immediately have its replacement lined up as the next initiative because no one can face supporting/upgrading the “legacy” solution they just designed, built, and deployed. Don’t get me started on the way “those that can’t do” have redefined process around their own need for relevance and control.

With that said, I’ll concede to having burned out a little on that journey and currently being on a bit of a sabbatical where I’m toying with fun business ideas and other passions to reenergise and reboot creatively, so perhaps my cynicism is an anecdote rather than a snapshot.

I'm in embedded, there's also cutting edge stuff to work on. The nice thing is you can be mostly detached from annoying web apis and frameworks and databases. The not so nice stuff is dealing with crappy vendors, using crappy tool chains, and spending a ton of time setting up automated builds. Sometimes I think about switching to true embedded (I do embedded Linux) but that tends to pay less

Yeah this was my thought as well. If you’re paid to maintain software you have to actually do the work to keep up to date on its dependencies—that’s the job! We’ve seen the alternative play out countless times, GitHub forking Rails 2.3 and maintaining it for years and absorbing more and more tech debt for years until they bit the bullet and upgraded back to mainline Rails.

Sure I’m getting old and it sometimes feels tiresome that software is a treadmill, but hey, it’s job security! And more importantly, change opens space for improvement, which feels good even if it doesn’t always live up to the promise.